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For many office workers, the typical lunch hour is a sad desk lunch of a sandwich or slop bowl supplemented by a rotating schedule of snacks. According to a poll conducted by Yahoo and YouGov, half of employed Americans regularly eat at their workstations. And now theyre sharing it all on TikTok. Office snack content is hooking viewers online with captions such as WIEIAD (what I eat in a day) and what I ate at my 8-4, featuring office workers time-stamped eating schedules. Employees post montages of their morning coffee and breakfast of choice, followed by a time-lapse video of a variety of snacks and beverages consumed at their desk. Some videos have voice-overs, some have light jolly music, and others keep it monotonous, complete with keyboard ASMR. And if the workers employer offers free food (certainly a step above your tuna on rye in a brown paper bag), theyre sharing that, too. Rating everything I ate at the office today, one TikTok creator who works at the tech company Carta posted. First, she helps herself to free coffee, followed by a Cocojune yogurt with blueberries. For lunch, she shows a plate of chicken katsu and a range of beverages, including a lime Diet Coke and a Spindrift. The day ends with a protein bar. Her content frequently racks up hundreds of thousands of views. In a separate video, she provided a close-up of the snack selection, due to popular demand. My show is on, one user commented. Another wrote that theyd love to see how much money this saves you eating at work every day. A day of office lunches may not sound like thrilling source material for social media, but clips of what people are eating at work are an extremely popular content niche. There are more than 1.1 million videos on TikTok with the hashtag #wieiad, varying from corporate snack selections to what workers pack for their lunch from home. Why these mundane videos are oddly satisfying to watch, whos to say? For some, it may serve as inspiration; for others, it can give a sense of a companys workplace culture and perks. Perhaps we are simply nosy creatures. Free food at the office has long been a popular perk used to entice employees. In 2022, Meta eventually barred employees from bringing in Tupperware because too many had been stocking up on free food and taking it home with them. After the pandemic and the end of remote working left many companies seeking ways to entice workers back to the workplace, office snacks and free lunches were among the incentives employers turned to. Because who doesnt love a free lunch? (With the additional benefit for employers of keeping workers at their desks longer.) A recent change in tax law may throw a wrench in the WIEIAD trend, though: Starting in 2026, meals provided for the employer’s convenience, such as on-site or cafeteria meals, will no longer qualify for a tax deduction, according to professional services firm UHY. Some have suggested the change could apply to office snacks and coffee, too. Think of all the potential office mukbangs wed be deprived of.
Category:
E-Commerce
Ive tried them all. A fancy planner, perfect workout routines, ambitious ways to read more, and writing rituals to get more done. I did the research. But what ultimately worked is something called the kaizen incremental method. An idea is from Japanese manufacturing, of all places. It means continuous improvement. The practice of tiny actions. A step so small your brains resistance (a built-in fight-or-flight response to big, scary changes) doesnt even bother to fight it. I use the kaizen approach as a backdoor to building new neural pathways. Im not forcing change; Im gently guiding my brain into new habits, one step at a time. Thats how I started writing almost every day. I opened my laptop and started putting thoughts down at the same time daily. I didnt aim to write a whole page. Just ideas down. After a few weeks of the same practice, writing things down became easy. Not effortless. But the resistance was not the same. Thats the kaizen advantage. You work with your psychology, not against it. Big goals Youve probably tried the new year, new me approach to life. You start the year with big goals. And big motivation. But most people dont even make it through to March. Whats helped me is tiny but consistent routines, rituals, and behaviours. It doesnt matter what time of year. I focus on stacking good actions. The kaizen approach feels like nothing. Until suddenly it feels like everything. The easier a behavior is to do, the more likely the behavior will become habit, writes B.J. Fogg in his book, Tiny Habits. Kaizen matches how you live. Say you want to read more. The old way: Ill read 50 books this year! You buy a stack, stare at it, and feel behind by February. The Kaizen way: Ill read one page before bed. One page. Youll often read more. But on the worst day of your life, one page is still a victory. Youve kept the habit alive. One tiny bit of progress at a time. You read one or two pages of your favorite book daily. A year later, youve finished more books than ever. You save $50 a month. One day, youve built an emergency fund. You start by tidying one drawer. Eventually, your whole space feels clean. Theres no one massive win. Just small wins stacking up. When you want big results, small steps feel insulting. You want to sprint. You want the outcome that means everything. You want proof that youre serious. Direction is everything But being serious means not stopping. The secret is in the consistency, not the intensity. A 1% improvement, repeated, is compound interest for your life. Do the math: 1% better every day for a year, and youre nearly 38 times better by the end. Life isnt that linear, but the direction is everything. Youre moving forward, not stalling out in a cycle of ambition and guilt. Youll doubt it at first. I did. It feels too small, too insignificant. One page of reading is nothing! But nothing is sustainable. Youre playing the long game. You cant overhaul your entire life every January. You will burn out and feel frustrated. Youll feel like you failed when really, its your system that failed. Small steps are not a compromise. Theyre a sustainable life strategy. Make your system too easy to fail. Pick the smallest version of the thing you want. If the goal is to write, maybe you start with one sentence a day. Yes, one. Whats the point? The goal is not to overwhelm your brain. Convince yourself its too easy not to try. The more you practice, the greater the chance of it becoming a habit. Make it repeatable If you need willpower, its too big. Keep score. Tiny wins feel bigger when you can see them. Can you quantify your results? Show your wins to yourself. And let yourself feel proud. Seriously. Celebrate the tiny stuff. Your brain loves reward signals. Over time, your small steps evolve. You dont have to force it. Momentum does the heavy lifting. Kaizen doesnt just help you change. It changes how you see yourself. When you repeat every day, even in tiny ways, you stop seeing yourself as someone who tries. You start seeing yourself as someone who does. And that transformation is everything. Big change looks impressive, but small, consistent action builds identity. They build trust in yourself. They build a life that doesnt fall apart the minute motivation fades. If you want a change that can last in the next few months, something that sticks, try smaller. Way smaller. The path to significant change isnt broken resolutions. Its tiny, steady progress. Just pick an area of change. A tiny habit you can sustain. And start small. Pick one thing you are likely to do. Something that wont tell your brain its a big deal. Kaizen is the discipline of consistency. You dont need a new version of yourself to pursue things too overwhelming for your brain to sustain. What you need is just todays version, willing to take one small, almost silly step. Significant change is not an event you schedule. Its a practice. Youre not breaking yourself down to build something new. Youre just guiding yourself, kindly, in a better direction. Take that goal you are pursuing. Now, make it smaller. Smaller still. Until you think, Oh, I could do that right now. Then do it. And trust that tiny start with all your heart. Its the smartest, most human way forward youve got.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Trump administration is spending millions on advertisements aimed at recruiting new U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. The ads are so widespread that TV viewers and social media users alike are seeing them everywhere, including on YouTube, Spotify, and LinkedIn. In one recent ad seen on LinkedIn, a stern-faced Uncle Sam points at the viewer. The message reads: “Join ICE Today” along with the note, “$50,000 signing bonus” at the bottom. Likewise, a 30-second TV spot that originally aired during the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards broadcast in September has been spotted nationwide in the months since. You took an oath to protect and serve, to keep your family, your city, safe, the narrator says in the promotion. But in sanctuary cities, youre ordered to stand down while dangerous illegals walk free. It’s hard to tell what sets certain cities apart, but the call to action has been specifically targeting Albuquerque, Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York, Philadelphia, Sacramento, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. More recently, the ads have been seen in Atlanta, Dallas, Miami, and Salt Lake City, as well as in San Antonio, Houston, and El Paso, Texas, according to AP News. The ads are part of the Trump administration’s $30 billion initiative to hire 10,000 more ICE agents by year’s end. According to data from Equis, acquired by Rolling Stone, the Department of Homeland Security has been spending millions to reach more and more Americans. DHS has spent about $2.8 million since March to keep ads running on Meta’s Facebook and Instagram. Since August, the agency has paid Meta another $500,000 to run recruitment ads. DHS also spent $3 million on Google and YouTube ads in Spanish instructing people to self-deport. Ads have been running on Spotify and Pandora as well, but Equis did not have data on how much DHS spent on those ads. Spending didn’t stop or slow down during the government shutdown, either. According to Newsweek, DHS reportedly kept throwing money at ICE recruitment efforts while millions of workers went without paychecks. Over the three-week shutdown, ICE spent around $4.5 million on paid media. Millions of people are at risk of losing their food stamps and are about to go hungry because of this government shutdown, Natalia Campos Vargas, deputy research director at Equis, told Newsweek at the time. But somehow the Trump administration and DHS and ICE are choosing to spend millions of dollars on ad campaigns. That just feels inherently wrong to me as a taxpayer.” As ICE has ramped up recruitment efforts, the pushback has been gaining steam. On December 11, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was grilled by lawmakers about alleged wrongful deportations of U.S. citizens, including military veterans. Noem was confronted with individuals the agency allegedly deported. The secretary left the meeting early and was heckled upon exiting. Meanwhile, anti-ICE ads combating the pro-deportation narrative have also popped up on various platforms. In one ad from Home of the Brave, Army veteran George Retes, a U.S. citizen, tells the story of his ICE abduction. My drivers side window shatters. An agent sticks his arm through and pepper sprays me in the face. They drag me out of the car. They throw me on the ground. They zip-tie my hands behind my back,” Retes says in the video, which is airing nationally across streaming platforms. Had they just looked at my ID, they would have seen that Im a U.S. citizen, that Im a veteran. . . . Whats happening right now isnt right.” Still, while many users may be uncomfortable with the surge in ICE ads online, the organizations running them seem undeterred. A Spotify spokesperson told Fast Company that the ad is part of a broader, well-documented U.S. government campaign running across multiple platforms, including television, streaming, and online channels.” The spokesperson added that users are able to control their ad preferences. “Spotify is an open platform that supports a wide range of voices and perspectives, even those some people may personally disagree with. That’s why we believe listener control is key to that balance and users can like or dislike specific ads as well as update their ad preferences, including opting out of certain categories such as government. While there has been a surge in calls for Spotify users to boycott the platform over the ICE ads, as well as over founder Daniel Ek’s investment in Helsing, a German defense company, the platform says there has been “no material impact in terms of cancellations.” Fast Company reached out to LinkedIn and YouTube in regard to the running of ICE recruitment ads but did not hear back by the time of publication.
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E-Commerce
One of Michaels friends told him recently, Im not burned out; Im just feeling empty. She shows up, meets deadlines, and manages to smile in meetings. But her work feels weightless and disconnected from purpose. Shes not alone. Gallups 2025 State of the Global Workplace report found that only 21% of employees worldwide are engaged, and just one in three say theyre thriving. Thats not a blipits a warning signal for leaders and cultures. When emptiness shows up at work, our reflex is to pathologize: Is this burnout? Do I need a diagnosis? Sometimes, yesclinical conditions require clinical care. However, many of todays struggles are fundamentally philosophical, centered on issues such as purpose, values, identity, and the meaning of life. Those dont always need a medical label; they need better questions. Why We Need a Different Lens Disengagement is expensive. Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy $8.8 trillion annually, nearly 9% of global GDP. Manager engagement is also slipping, dropping three points in 2024, with a ripple effect on teams. The human cost? Teams feel flat, leaders are running on fumes, and organizations are mistaking busyness for progress. Cognitive scientist John Vervaeke refers to our current moment as a meaning crisisa cultural shortfall in making sense of our lives. That frame helps us see that the emptiness that many feel isnt always a disorder; often, its a signal. Therapy is essential when theres a clinical risk. But when the primary challenge is purposenot pathologyphilosophy can be the right first (or parallel) step. What Philosophical Counseling Looks Like at Work Philosophy at work doesnt show up as abstract debates about Plato in the break room. It shows up as structured reflection in moments when leaders feel stuck, conflicted, or unclear. Unlike traditional coaching, which often emphasizes goals and performance, or therapy, which focuses on healing emotional wounds, philosophical counseling creates clarityhelping you slow down to examine the ideas, assumptions, and values that drive decisions. In practice, this means creating a conversational space where leaders can explore the deeper questions that often remain unaddressed in quarterly reviews or strategic planning sessions. Its not about diagnosing or prescribing. Its about holding up a mirror to how you think, and then gently but persistently asking whether those patterns are serving you. Sometimes, testing your core ideas against a contrary philosophical position helps you change your mind, but it also helps you formulate your idea with better precision and focus. So, a philosophical counseling session isnt about advice. Its an inquiry guided by questions like: What do you mean by success here? (Define the concept before you chase it.) Which assumptions are you treating as facts? (Surface the hidden rules youre following.) What obligations follow from your values? (Tie action to meaning, not mood.) One VP I worked with felt behind in her career. She wasnt looking to change jobs; she was questioning whether she should. From the outside, her role was a success story: she was leading complex cross-functional work, mentoring future leaders, and shaping long-term strategy. But because her peers seemed to leapfrog into splashier titles, she had internalized the myth that a career only counts if it moves in a straight, upward line. Together, we explored economist David Galensons distinction between conceptual and experimental innovators: some leaders peak early with bold, disruptive visions, while others build mastery through experience, iteration, and depth. When she looked at her own path through that lens, she realized her current role was giving her exactly what an experimental innovator needsbreadth, autonomy, and repeated opportunities to refine her craft. Her progress wasnt stalled; it was accumulating. Once she saw her trajectory as cumulative rather than delayed, the pressure loosened. She didnt need a new job; she needed a new narrative. And with that reframing, her energy and her confidence returned. Another founder I worked with was trapped in performative productivity, equating worth with constant output. After interrogating his deeper purpose, he shifted from chasing vanity metrics to making value-aligned bets. Hiring became more intentional. Product decisions became braver. And his leadership became far more sustainable. Practical Steps for Leaders & Organizations The goal isnt to turn executives into armchair philosophers. Its to equip them with tools that help cut through noise, clarify assumptions, and ground decisions in meaning rather than momentum. Philosophers have long been aware of their reputation for getting lost in thought. As Plato recounts in Theaetetus, Thales once fell into a ditch while contemplating the heavens. Leaders dont need another abstract framework piled onto their already full plates. Philosophical counseling brings philosophy back to the ground, connecting it with everyday problems and offering clear practices that create space for reflection and insight without derailing productivity. When leaders bring this lens into the workplace, they not only strengthen their own claritythey normalize purposeful inquiry across the culture. Here are some concrete ways to start weaving philosophy into your leadership tool kit and organizational systems: Run an Assumption Audit. With a partner, list current dilemmas. For each, ask: What must be true for my conclusion to hold? How else might I interpret the facts? Institutionalize Socratic Stand-Ups. Once a month, replace a staff meeting with a facilitated dialogue on a first-principles question (e.g., What are we optimizing for?) and publish the reasoning behind the decision, not just the outcome. Offer a Meaning Map workshop. Help leaders chart their values, obligations, and behaviors. If values dont result in better choices, theyre not valuestheyre slogans. Use AI thoughtfully. Employees increasingly confide in chatbots. Health experts caution against relying on generative AI for mental health, as it lacks safeguards and nuance. Organizations should establish policies and direct people to seek human assistance when needed. Return-to-office and hybrid work have scrambled the social fabric. However, micro-rituals matter: leave five minutes for human check-ins on Zoom, host optional philosophy salons, or design in-person days around connction. These arent time-wasters; theyre trust builders. Philosophy provides leaders and teams with a disciplined approach to thinking about what mattersenabling them to act with clarity, rather than merely coping. Your colleague who feels empty may not need a diagnosis. She may need to reorient her thinking by asking more effective questions. And those questions may be the most practical tools we have for navigating the complexity of modern work.
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E-Commerce
Somehow, it didnt leak. When I caught up with Rivian founder and CEO RJ Scaringe after the companys AI & Autonomy Day keynote on December 11 at its Palo Alto headquarters, he marveled that the company had managed to keep the events news under wraps until it was ready for its big reveal. It didand there was a lot to discuss. At the keynote, Rivian unveiled its Gen 3 platform, which will turn the maker of EV trucks, SUVs, and vans into an autonomy company, a focus he says will subsume the whole business of transportation. Debuting late next year in a version of the upcoming R2 SUV, the Rivian Autonomy Computer platform is powered by a chip the company designed itself, the RAP1 (Rivian Autonomy Processor). The R2s self-driving features will also draw on data from a lidar unit that sits inconspicuously at the top of the windshielda far cry from the spinning lidar towers atop vehicles such as Waymos. (Controversially, Teslas cars dont use lidar sensors.) Rivian also showed off a new voice-controlled user interface called the Rivian Assistant that will be available as an update for its current vehicles as well as for the R3. A bet on the future of car interfaces shifting toward talking rather than tapping on screens, it features integration with Google Calendarhinting at the kind of productivity-related features that might become more useful as cars take over more of the work of driving themselves. I spoke with Scaringe about all these topics and more. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. At least in broad strokes, how much of what you announced today was part of the original Rivian vision and road map? Well, that was 20 years ago. But something like today is the result of many thousands of people working on it for the last few years. Development on the platforms we showed today started in 2022. One of the threads connecting a lot of your news is you doing stuff yourself rather than being dependent on other parties. Was there a period where you werent sure which way to go? Maybe the way to answer that is that when we launched in 2021, we had what we call our Gen 1 architecture. And it was a very different approach than what went into our Gen 2 and, of course, what’s going into our Gen 3. We had a perception platformsome of which was our own, much of which was not our ownthat fed into a planner, which was our own, and made a set of rules-based decisions around how to drive the vehicle. It was very basic driver assistance: low level two features. And by virtue of that being the architecture, we had a natural limit. We realized that as we approached the launchthat the world was going to shift away from these more deterministic and classical systems to a true AI-based system. Its sort of ironic. When we say self-driving, we might think historically it’s always been AI. But in the beginning, actually, there was no AI. Some of it was very sophisticated if-then statements with good machine vision. What its shifted to now is true AI, and that happened in the early 2020s. As that was happening, we came to the view that we needed to completely shift our approach. And when we made that decision in early 2022, we approached it as a clean sheet. With that clean-sheet approach, it was, Let’s design our own perception platform. Let’s design our own compute platform with Gen 2, leveraging Nvidia as a supplier of the chips themselves, the inference platforms themselves, and go build a data flywheel that will allow us to build a neural net-based approach. The vehicles ultimately launched in the middle of 2024, a little less than a year and a half ago. And then, in parallel to that, we also kicked off some big hardware efforts, the biggest of which is an in-house chip. To go from zerono chip design team, no chip in-house, no chip IPto launching a chip takes time, it takes many hundreds of millions of dollars, it takes a very, very large organization. But we made the decision in 22 and we’ve been working towards it. Somehow, it didnt leak. But it’s now nice that we can talk about it publicly and it’s going to be in the vehicles next year. An AI-centric approach required this vertical integration of perception. It doesn’t necessitate owning compute, but owning compute allows you to deliver it at a lower cost level and, in our case, a higher performance level. We just have such a conviction that [autonomy] isnt just a part of the auto industry. If you look out a little bit, this is the whole business. And so we built this view that where we deploy most of our R&D should be this category. Was it completely obvious you needed lidar? There’s a thinking around lidar that needs to be shed, which is that they’re expensive and mechanically complex. The old Velodyne lidars, even what you see on the roads today, they were really complex sensors. But they’re now very low cost, extremely reliable, and solid-state based. Ten years ago, the best-performing lidar you could buy was maybe $70,000. Five years ago, it was maybe $5,000. Today it’s in the low hundreds of dollars. And so it’s become so cost-effective at turning the entire fleet into a ground truth fleet. It’s really helpful for training your cameras, especially in adverse conditions. When you peel back the onion and you look at the cost trajectory of the sensor, it’s become this sort of strange debate, because Tesla’s taken such a stance on it. But it wasn’t really a debate. If it was a $10,000 sensor, it would’ve been a different story. But when it’s a few-hundred-dollars decision, it’s much easier to make. Your new assistants Google Calendar integration made me realize that if I don’t have to spend quite as much time thinking about driving, there’s a lot of opportunity to be productive in the car. To what degree are you trying to build a richly powerful assistant? Google Calendar is just one of what will become many instances of integrations. Today there’s a limited set that have been set up to go agent-to-agent. But any platform that’s going to truly survive, and not just get gobbled up by an AI platform, will need to become very, very capable in terms of enabling agent-to-agent. Effectively like SDKs [software development kits] that just make it very easy to plug in. The goal is that essentially any app that you might want to use, we’ll be able to plug into our agents and it’ll be seamless. So you can reach across apps like you saw today. You talked to the car, the car was able to reach into Google and find the calendar. We were able to tell it to move something, and it reached back to Google through an agent and moved eveything around. It’s the tip of the iceberg. All these things will start to become so natural where the car becomes like a personal assistant. If you want to move your schedule or order food or schedule someone to come to your house to fix the plumbing, all this stuff just becomes very, very easy to do. And if you are no longer driving the car, you may want to be able to use the car to help you with more of these things. Do you have any sense as to what the future looks like in terms of robotaxis and autonomous private vehicles coexisting? I definitely think they’ll coexist. Theyre anything but mutually exclusive. The existence of level four [autonomy] is what enables both of them, and the technology from a level four point of view is the same. We’re focused on the tech, and the initial instance planned is a personally owned vehicle. But it doesn’t preclude us from doing robotaxis or rideshare. Rideshare today is such a small percentage of miles. I used to be of the view that we’d go from 99% of the world’s miles being in personally owned vehicles to 50% being in personally owned ones and the other half of the world’s miles being in shared. Maybe that happens, but I think it’s probably more likely to go from 99% to 90%. Maybe that’s because I have kids now, and the complexities of car seats and soccer balls and soccer outfits. I think it will be different country to country. When you look at the wealth level in the United States, if you can afford a car today, a lot of people would still rather own one and have the simplicity of it always being available for them and their family. But I actually don’t need to have a strong conviction on this either way. If theres a heavy shift in the model of consumption, we’re equally ready for that. Im surprised how much attention the business model gets. If one end of the spectrum is traditional ownership as we know it today, and the other end of the spectrum is pay as you go, we’re not being very imaginative. There are going to be a lot of things in the middle. Maybe I own the vehicle during the daytime and somebody else uses the vehicle at night. Maybe the vehicle’s mine during the week and another family’s during the weekend. Maybe the vehicle’s shared among five or six people as opposed to infinitely shared. There’s just going to be a spectrum of new ways to consume mobility, the moment the vehicle can drive itself. And our view is we’re going to exist across that entire spectrum. But the only thing that’s absolutely certain that’s necessary for any point on that spectrum is level four. Robotaxis dont work with level three. Personal level four obviously doesn’t work with level three. You need level four. So that’s what we’re focused on.
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E-Commerce
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